Good Advice

I'm looking for some good advice from somebody that has used VB.NET with Oracle 8. Is using the disconnected data-set truely the way to go?? Or is there more overhead in connecting to the Database with each call to the database.

For a small number of clients you can keep your connection open,
But if you have large number of clients you need to open and close your connection.
Plus read this on connection pooling:
Pooling Connections
Applications often have different users performing the same type of database access. For example, in ASP.NET Web applications many users might be querying the same database to get the same data. In those cases, the performance of the application can be enhanced by having the application share, or "pool," connections to the data source. The overhead of having each user open and close a separate connection can otherwise have an adverse effect on application performance.
If you are using the OleDbConnection class, connection pooling is handled automatically by the provider, so you do not need to manage it yourself. If you are using the SqlConnection class, connection pooling is managed implicitly, but also provides options that allow you to manage pooling yourself. For more information, see Connection Pooling for the SQL Server .NET Data Provider.

Hi I am not a pro with .NET yet but could share some light on the subject...

A DataSet object is truly disconnected, meaning you would only have to go and connect once to get the data from the database and then again to update the changes in the dataset back to the datasource.

When connecting to an Oracle database make sure to use the OLEDBConnection and OLEDBCommand Classes.

Just remember that ADO.NET consist of Dataset classes and provider classes.
1. The Dataset classes are used to build a disconnected database structure in memory. They contain:
DataRelation, DataColumn, DataRow, DataTable classes in order to achieve this.
2. The provider Classes is XxxConnection eg. SQLConnection or OLEDBConnection and
XxxCommand eg. SQLCommand or OLEDBCommand

In your case you will also need the DataAdapter class to fill the Dataset. The DataAdapter class will also be used to update changes back to the database. This is achieved through calling any of its command classes nl. SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE (DataAdapter Contains these 4 command classes by default)

There is probably more overhead in coding the Dataset, but that is it...

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